(The
two-humper is the Bactrian camel; one hump is the
dromedary. No one cares.)

A
colleague of minemade the off-hand commentthe other day, “Aw, who wants to read about
camels?!” (We were talking about plagiarism. You
figure it out.)Oh, yeah?I thought.I bet
I can relate camels to Naples. After all, there are
some camels in the Naples zoo, and bits and pieces of
camel bones from the Greek city of Neapolis have even
been found(seeBökönyi,
below).

It sounded easy.
Everyone knows that the Romans knew about camels. They
even brought back camels from the far-flung reaches of
the empire and raced them in games in the Colosseum. I
googled "camels in Italy" and—bingo!— actually got
“How many camels are there in Italy?” It was too good
to be true. No, really. It was a hoax —or
at least a psychology study (which is damned near the
same thing). The question was the title of an article in
the journal, Neurological Sciences, on
how we figure out the answers to questions that are not
immediately answerable but that can be effectively
guessed using general knowledge. Other questions
included “How many eyelashes do we have on our lower
eyelid?” and “How high is a traffic light?” The
questions all had real answers as well as the answers
provided by 175 subjects. Abnormally high or low
estimates were considered bizarre and meant that you had
something wrong with you, but I don't know what. The
correct answer to the eye-lash question was 60; traffic
lights are 3 meters high; and there are 40 camels in
Italy (the estimates ranged as high as 400).

Plan B. The Arabs
ruled Sicily in the 10th century. Did they
import camels from Africa? Of course. Did any of the
animals find their way onto the mainland? Yes. How? In
the year 1061, in a valley near Cerami on the island of
Sicily, the Norman ruler,
Roger, with a band of a few hundred soldiers, defeated
an overwhelmingly superior Arab force in a battle that
was decisive in bringing Sicily back into Europe and
stemming the northern push of Islam into Italy. That
battle remains relatively unheralded, but it was as
important as the earlier Battle of Tours
in France in 732, which stemmed the advance of Islam in
that part of Europe. To help celebrate, Roger then sent
four of his adversaries' camels as a present to Pope
Alexander II. Roger kept and used the rest. Even today,
near Messina the figure of the camel crops up in various
folk rituals that celebrate that Norman victory. Later,
Ferdinand II de Medici (1610-1670) kept some camels near
Pisa. They were a gift of the bey of
Tunisia, and shortly thereafter, in 1683, more
camels wound up in Italy as a result of the victory over
the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna. In 1692 the
Medicis then started to raise camels in the Mugello, an
area of Tuscany. By the mid-1700s there was a herd of
200 camels at San Rossore (near Pisa, and as late as the
early 1900s there was still a small herd of camels in
San Rossore. The last one died in 1976.

The Roger who sent the camels to the
pope was the first consolidator of Norman holdings in
southern Italy and the father of Roger II, the first
ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily, later to be known as theKingdom
of Two Siciliesor
the Kingdom of Naples.

References:

Bökönyi, S. (1974) History
of Domestic Mammals in Central and Eastern Europe.
Budapest.